Nov 30, 2012

OSCAR FUTURES: Lincoln

An interesting thing happened at the box
office this Thanksgiving. The top two spots were taken, predictably enough, by
the new Bond movie, Skyfall, and the
final part of the Twilight Saga, Breaking
Dawn Part 2. But right behind Bond and Bella at number 3 was Abe Lincoln,
as given flesh by Daniel Day-Lewis in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. To date it has taken $62 million, almost its entire
production budget, in just two weeks. It may be the year’s most unlikely
blockbuster. Of the three passes Spielberg has made at the subject of slavery —
The Color Purple in 1982, Amistad in 1997 — Lincoln is by far the least
Spielbergian. There is no action to speak of, only the skimpiest of battles
scenes, little grand oratory, a bare minimum of John Williams music, and no
glimpse of the assassination. The film instead gives its audience 149 minutes
of dense political maneuvering in dark
smoke-filled rooms, as Lincoln hunts down the votes necessary to pass the 13th
amendment. It’s a film about process,
a political procedural. What’s particularly impressive is that Lincoln
is playing as well in red states as well as blue, as if buoyed by the small
swell of bipartisanship in Washington in the wake of Obama’s re-election.“This is more a
film for Robert Caro than for the masters of combat video games,” wrote DavidThomson, a decided Spielberg agnostic, in the pages of The New Republic:—

…to see it in the immediate
aftermath of Barack Obama’s second election is the way to go. You can tell
yourself that the resulting surge of emotion is a matter of chance, or
God-given, but then you realize that Steven must have organized it this way. He
foresaw our moment, he designed his opening, and Lincoln is
especially momentous as the second Obama administration realizes there is no
peace for the elected. It would have had a different resonance if the November
6 result had gone the other way. But Steven—not for the first time—planned an
opening that would work either way.

In other words, Spielberg’s knack for
national pulse-taking — which
turned Jaws and E.T. into national events, and Saving Private Ryan into a
generational salute — hasn’t deserted him. Might Spielberg be on the verge of
joining Frank Capra and William Wyler in the paddock of three-time Best
Director Oscar Winners?The Academy have been remarkably slow to
honor Spielberg, and certainly not for his early quartet of films — Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. — which rank among the greater glories of American popular cinema. His emergence as a box-office pied piper
in late seventies and early eighties — with — coincided with the
academy’s Knights In White Flannel phase, when they turned to the British
period dramas like Chariots of Fire
and Ghandhi to reassure themselves that
the rivers of cash they were busy making from big summer hits like Spielberg’s
didn’t suggest anything too unseemly
about the business. As Spielberg noted, painfully, on the day of the
nominations in 1976, when Jaws
received only four nominations and Fellini nabbed his spot for Best
Director. “This is called commercial backlash. When a film makes a lot of money
people resent it. Everybody loves a winner but nobody loves a winner.” Not until Forrest Gump in 1993, could the academy bring themselves to reward
a film that made over $100 million, thus opening up the way for Titanic and Lord of the Rings.

The Academy’s attitude to the big
money-makers is still ambivalent, witness the annual game everyone goes through
trying to predict a nomination for something like Harry Potter — or is it the new Christopher Nolan? Or
maybe the new Bond? —in order to fill out the new expanded nomination berth,
only to see it filled instead with something small, worthy and unwinning from
the indie sphere. “The voters often like low budget/high return best and they
hate high budget/low return most” writes SashaStone at Awards Daily, which is why Life of Pi, which cost $120 million, and was released this weekend
to take in a respectable $30 will have to keep that up to become the Avatar-like
must-see phenomenon it needs to be to win Best Picture in February. It’s still
the best-looking dark horse out there.What the Academy really likes to see,
above all else, is this:—

That’s the box office takings of Slumdog Millionaire, the 2009 winner,
from Box Office Mojo. See that first big spike at around 80 days? That’s the
film getting nominated. And the second big spike at about 110 days? That’s it’s
win on February 22nd — the so-called ‘Oscar Bounce’, a much
under-appreciated factor in the Oscar Race, not for the money, but for what
that money means: the world is listening. The Academy, like all of us, likes to
be listened to. It wants its recommendation to carry weight. Which isn’t to say
that it can boss people around. They certainly don’t want a repeat of this: —

That’s the box office graph for Crash, that most wretched of winners
from 2006, which tanked at the box office, despite being pumped full of Oscar
steroids. The Academy want to play king-maker, not Svengali. The film must be
already on its way up before they give it a lift. It’s box office doesn’t even
have to be all that big. As I said, this is not about the money. Here, for
instance, is the graph for The HurtLocker, the lowest-grossing film ever to win the Academy Award for best
picture:—

It’s exactly the same as the Slumdog Millionaire curve, except in
miniature. So what is this about, if it’s not about the money?

There’s one other thing the two graphs
have in common. Thy bear a startling resemblance to the kind of box-office
takings films used to make, in the land Time Forgot, before $100 million
marketing campaigns and day-and-date saturation releases in 3,000 cinemas all
but guaranteed a first-weekend audience of semi-satiated teenagers for your
13-writer franchise hopeful, KerPlunk:
The Movie, thus allowing it to join Battleship
and Total Recall and all those Not
Quite Hits and Unexploded Bombs, neither wildly popular nor devastatingly
unpopular, just there, circling the
earth like blimps, slowly raking in DVD rentals from Abu Dhabi and pay-per-view
from Peking.The obsession with box office numbers is
a modern phenomenon, dating to the mid-eighties, but so too is cynicism about
the numbers. The academy are not just nostalgics in their taste in films:
they’re nostalgic about the numbers too. Those Oscar winning bellwethers recall an
older, simpler time when word-of-mouth still existed, when films built their
audience, and a purchased ticket didn't just meant money for the film’s
producer. It also meant, as likely as not — certainly if it occurred two
or three weeks into a film’s run — that the person who purchased it had enjoyed themselves. Or if they didn’t
enjoy themselves at least been directed there by someone who had. It meant a
hit.If such talk is too populist for you, then
think of it this way: that purchased ticket was the equivalent of one good
review, and a million of those tickets meant a million good reviews. The public
voted and the way they voted produced a remarkable accurate relief map of their
affections. The more curvaceous the curve, the deeper the love. You want to know what audience love for a
movie looks like? It looks like this.

That’s the curve for Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of The Southern Wild. It doesn’t
stand a chance of winning the Best Picture Oscar, but if it gets a nomination
— and it should — it will have something to do with the shape of that
graph. Which is why Spielberg’s team at Dreamworks can afford to be a little
excited by this early flutter in the public breast:—

Wouldn't it be interesting if the people
who put Lincoln over the finishing
line were — well, the people?

"The book is a must for Woody Allen fans" - Joe Meyers, Connecticut Post

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R E V I E W S

"What makes the book worth taking home, however, is the excellent text... by Tom Shone, a film critic worth reading whatever aspect of the film industry he talks about. (His book Blockbuster is a must).... Most critics are at their best when speaking the language of derision but Shone has the precious gift of being carried away in a sensible manner, and of begin celebratory without setting your teeth on edge." — Clive James, Prospect "The real draw here is Shone’s text, which tells the stories behind the pictures with intelligence and grace. It’s that rarest of creatures: a coffee-table book that’s also a helluva good read." — Jason Bailey, Flavorwire

"There’s a danger of drifting into blandness with this picture packed, coffee-table format. Shone is too vigorous a critic not to put up a fight. He calls Gangs “heartbreaking in the way that only missed masterpieces can be: raging, wounded, incomplete, galvanised by sallies of wild invention”. There’s lots of jazzy, thumbnail writing of this kind... Shone on the “rich, strange and unfathomable” Taxi Driver (1976) cuts to the essence of what Scorsese is capable of." — Tim Robey, The Sunday Telegraph

"A beautiful book on the Taxi Driver director's career by former Sunday Times film critic Tom Shone who relishes Scorsese's "energetic winding riffs that mix cinema history and personal reminiscence".' — Kate Muir,The Times"No mere coffee table book. Shone expertly guides us through Scorsese’s long career.... Shone shows a fine appreciation of his subject, too. Describing Taxi Driver (1976) as having ‘the stillness of a cobra’ is both pithy and apposite.... Fascinating stuff." — Michael Doherty, RTE Guide"An admiring but clear-eyed view of the great American filmmaker’s career... Shone gives the book the heft of a smart critical biography... his arguments are always strong and his insights are fresh. The oversized book’s beauty is matched by its brains”— Connecticut Post

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“The film book of the year.... enthralling... groundbreaking.” — The Daily Telegraph

“Blockbuster is weirdly humane: it prizes entertainment over boredom, and audiences over critics, and yet it’s a work of great critical intelligence” – Nick Hornby, The Believer

“Beautifully written and very funny... I loved it and didn’t want it to end.” – Helen Fielding“[An] impressively learned narrative... approachable and enlightening... Shone evinces an intuitive knowledge of what makes audiences respond... One of those rare film books that walks the fine line between populist tub-thumping and sky-is-falling, Sontag-esque screed.” – Kirkus Reviews

“Exhilarating.... wit, style and a good deal of cheeky scorn for the opinions of bien-pensant liberal intellectuals.” – Phillip French, Times Literary Supplement

“Startlingly original... his ability to sum up an actor or director in one well-turned phrase is reminiscent of Pauline Kael’s... the first and last word on the subject. For anyone interested in film, this book is a must read.” – Toby Young, The Spectator

“A history of caring” – Louis Menand, The New Yorker“Smart, observant… nuanced and original, a conversation between the kid who saw Star Wars a couple dozen times and the adult who's starting to think that a handful might have sufficed.” – Chris Tamarri, The Village Voice

"A sweet and savvy page-turner of a valentine to New York, the strange world of fiction, the pleasures of a tall, full glass and just about everything else that matters" — Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story and Absurdistan